Thursday, June 19, 2008

Harassment of Baha'is

An old friend and journalist colleague, former Masterton boy Mike Day, is national media officer for the Australian Baha’i Community. He advises of the following renewal of harassment of Baha’is in Iran:

In the early hours of May 14 six of the seven members of the national coordinating committee of the Baha'i Community in Iran were rounded up. (The seventh was already in jail). We are seriously worried about their safety.

The elected administration (including a nine-member national body) has been banned from functioning for years but the Iranian regime had turned a blind eye to the committee, which has been attending to the basic needs of the 300,000 Baha’is who live throughout Iran (the country's biggest religious minority).

We are not sure where these seven are now and don't know what is being done to them. In the early 80s their predecessors went missing and their bodies have never been found. Eight of their nine replacements were executed. Many Baha’is were executed and a lot more tortured. Refugees came to Australia and other countries initially and later to NZ.

Later, media publicity throughout the world and outrage by governments seemed to stay the hand of the persecutors.

It is straight religious persecution (our Founder came after Muhammad). The Baha’is are told that if they convert to Islam they will be freed and left alone, but Baha’is will not recant. We must tell the truth about our religious belief if asked.

In addition we are obliged to obey the laws of the land and to abstain from political activity. It is hardly likely, then, that Iranian Baha’is would break the laws of their faith and be “spies for Israel”, as is often alleged. (Our HQ has been in the Holy Land – Haifa/Acre – since the mid-19th century).

Government documents exposed by a UN official in the 1990s prove there is a systematic plan to choke and eliminate the functioning of the Baha’i community. Most of the information is on our site www.bahai.org.au

Footnote: The father of one of Mike and Chris Day’s closest friends in NZ was executed in Shiraz, Iran, in the early 1980s for being a Baha’i. The Days’ second son, George Azadi Day, was named after him. (Azadi, meaning freedom, was his surname.)

If anyone feels moved to do so, I suggest they send an email to the Iranian embassy in Wellington – info@iranembassy.org.nz – expressing their concern for the missing Iranian Baha'is.

4 comments:

KarlThe people of the book (Jews and Christians) can become Dhimmi and pay jezyra (a head tax) for being insulting at not converting but they don't lose their lives.

They are also 3rd class citizens behind Muslim women and Apostates (temporary as not killed yet) and are treated as such.Your wife and kids won't ever be safe.

Pagans (anyone not of the book) can't become Dhimmi so must be killed.

Do a Google on Dhimmitude or Dhimmi.

Wikipedia will tell you most conversions of Dhimmis later were voluntary.Bullshit.Voluntary in that we'll treat you as dirt until you convert.

www.jihadwatch.orgwww.dhimmiwatch.orgwww.dhimmi.orgwww.dhimmi.com

The 1.5 million Armenian massacre in the early 20th century by Turkey came about because the Armenians didn't want to be Dhimmis any more.

Hence as far as the Muslims overlords were concerned "they had broken the contract that they accepted when conquered" so all protections ceased and were duly massacred.

Modern Turkey won't acknowledge the truth of this and as a result no one in Europe wants them in the EU.

Which of course no one wants to acknowledge either as it's a can of worms as then they have to publicly examine Dhimmitude and Islam.

Not something weak willed/valued Western countries want to do being so PC.

Of course having Muslim populations of 4-12% living amongst them adds spice to that conundrum.

We in NZ only have 35k right now, (though with every refugee bringing in 6 others on family repatriation that will change if the number of Muslims in the 750 quote keeps up), so we can have this open conversation if not drowned out by the PC Labour/Greens crowd.

The proposition expressed here of sending e-mail’s to the Iranian embassy in the hope of catalysing change to minority religious rights in that country has an air of innocent naivety about it.

While it can be considered under Western values and norms as an accepted method to put pressure on some states to sway their rulers to think again, this proposal put to the Islamic Iranian Republic regarding the abuse of their religious minorities is yet another example of the ignorance of Western thought that insists on filtering the Middle East through the prism of Western values where it is thought every situation can be solved by talking through problems with rulers who they falsely perceive to be receptive to fairness and equitableness and where everything is negotiable, every conflict is susceptible to a deal.

Considering the exhaustive high power face to face negotiations conducted over time under the worlds eyes and ears that have taken place between the West and Iran’s negotiators with all the maneuvering by Iran over their highly suspected rogue nuclear development and the West offering deal after deal which has resulted in achieving absolutely nothing, and putting to one side the ruling supremacist Islamic jurisprudence pertaining to other religions other than Islam the consideration by Iran of a few e-mails pale’s into insignificance.

The writing of Andrew Bostom and others as referenced by the above red pill gives a historic account and appreciation of the Islamic jurisprudence that governs the mindset of those current rulers of Iran and other strict Islamic states in the Middle East.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.